Robert Crowther

The Washington Post today published on their front page the latest in a series of drive-by reportings on intelligent design. Not surprisingly the reporter, Peter Slevin, sees this more as a political issue than a scientific issue. He’s much more concerned with how religious zealots may try to use ID theory in the political realm than whether or not peppered moths really rest on trees. Are Heaeckel’s embryo drawings less fake because the Post wants to make this a political issue? They’re missing the point, which is a scientific one.

I tried to get Slevin to focus more on the science than the politics, but he was determined to do a political piece. So he decided to come to Seattle and I encouraged him to interview both John West (see West’s blog about the interview here), our main policy person, and Steve Meyer as the director of the CSC and one of the main scientists involved in design theory. Slevin spent a day in Seattle and interviewed each of them at length. I sat in on the interviews and took notes myself, as well as helped to clarify certain issues when they came up.

The upshot is that John West spent nearly two hours with Slevin talking about the policy and politics of ID, and Steve Meyer spent equal time with Slevin and focused almost solely on what the case for ID is and how it is not an argument from ignorance as the Washington Post, and others, has persisted in defining it.

What does Slevin do? He does not quote John West at all. He does quote Steve Meyer — but he strings together different thoughts on different issues from different points in the conversation and presents them as if they are one single quote:

Science journalist Denyse O’Leary in an e-mail to me summed up today’s Washington Post story this way.

The Cobb Co. textbook disclaimer has finally been cleverly parodied by Steve Mirsky in the latest issue of Scientific American. And not a moment too soon. Let’s see, the first disclaimer sticker case was a decade or more ago in Louisiana. The Cobb Co. case originated just after the turn of the millennia, and it was over three years ago that the school district authorized the use of the disclaimers. About time someone at long last humorlessly skewered it. Never mind that in December 2004, The New York Times op-ed page published a chart by Colin Purrington, The Descent of Dissent that poked fun at disclaimer stickers and criticized anyone at all critical of evolution. Purrington of course had been Read More ›

Casey Luskin from the IDEA Center sent the following report on a recent news story that aired on San Diego’s Fox affiliate. Amazingly, the station devoted over four minutes — an eternity in TV news time — to looking at what ID is. An MPEG of the story is available for download from the IDEA Center at www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/1298. (newly updated link)

Dr. Chris Macosko at the University of Minnesota sent the following letter to The New York Times responding to Bruce Alberts comments about Mike Behe’s recent op-ed in the Times, “Design for Living.” Since the Times’ didn’t see fit to publish this letter, Dr. Macosko agreed to let us publish it here. To the Editor: Bruce Alberts, president of the NAS, responded to Michael Behe’s Feb. 7th Op-Ed. As an NAE member, I take exception to Dr. Alberts‚ — statement that “modern scientific views are entirely consistent with spontaneous variation and natural selection driving a powerful evolutionary process”, since he forces‚ — consistency — by excluding the alternative: intelligent design. Are there scientific grounds for his exclusion? On the contrary; Read More ›

Finding bias in MSM newspapers like the Houston Chronicle is like finding design in nature, not at all hard to do. Sunday, The Chronicle decided to publish Michael Behe’s op-ed that appeared last week in The New York Times.

The headline the Chronicle perched atop Behe’s column nicely illustrates the petty biases of the paper’s editorial board: “Intelligent design: Creation explained or quackery?”

This didn’t surprise me. Two years ago in the midst of the Texas controversy over error-ridden biology textbooks a Chronicle editorial board member sent us one of the tackiest letters we’ve received from the media. We approached the Chronicle and asked them to meet with us to talk about textbooks and challenges to Darwinian evolution — much as other major Texas papers like the Dallas Morning News — did at the time. The editor responded:

The Washington Times today ran with a straight news piece on the plight of evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg, who has been under fire recently for allowing a pro-ID paper to be published in his former journal the peer-reviewed “Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington.”

The Times reports that there is now an investigation underway:

Kansas is busy reviewing, and proposing revisions to, the standards by which it will measure what students know or don’t know about science. Regardless of the tin-ear reporting of some journalists, students in Kansas will continue to learn about evolution. The question is will they know ALL about evolution including the scientific evidence against it? Or, will they learn only about the evidence that supports it?

Reporting on the issue has run the gamut from good, to bad, to ugly. We remarked on the good previously, an article by Diane Carroll of the Kansas City Star. And, there was today another good article, by Elaine Bessier in the Johnson County Sun. In fact, Bessier’s article was more than good, it was downright fair and balanced.

Rather than conflate the revisions being proposed with intelligent design theory Bessier correctly reports:

Michael Behe’s op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times seems to have hit a nerve. Or two. Or three. Or perhaps all of them, if you’re a Darwinian dogmatist. Here’s a few. ID Hits the Times Op-Ed, Science Tuesday, De-Sign of the Times, ID is a “rival theory”. There were some blogs cheering Behe’s piece as well, most prominently the Evangelical Outpost. EO writes: ID in the NYT — Today’s New York Times presents an editorial by Michael Behe that does what no major media outlet has bothered to do: allow a prominent advocate of the theory to explain what Intelligent Design really is. Behe’s op-ed was the number two most e-mailed article from the Times’ website yesterday. Who says there’s Read More ›

Michael Behe’s op-ed “Design for Living” from today’s New York Times is the third most e-mailed article from today’s Times.